Genesis of the Web

The ubiquity of computers has been propelled by the increasing popularity of the internet. In all honesty, a computer without the internet is a very boring and uninteresting machine. Have you ever bought a brand new android phone and notice how deficient it was see without an access to the internet?

To most of us, the internet has become part of our necessities. It is as important as food, shelter and love. We cannot live without it! And when by reason of circumstances greater than ourselves, we are cut off from the net, we feel incomplete. However, have you ever wondered how did this thing called the Web ever begin?

The web began in Geneva Switzerland where a young scientist called Tim Berners Lee working for the CERN laboratories got frustrated with the troubles he had to face daily in retrieving his Scheduler, phone numbers, and his documents which were stored on different computers at different offices. To solve this problem, he wrote a program called “Enquire Everything” in 1980 that would help employees of the CERN access their private data across different machine. He gave them this program as a parting gift before he left the CERN for another employment opportunity.

Upon his return to the CERN in 1989, he discovered that no one had used his program productively while the data employees had to access had increased and varied greatly. Even more frustrated, he proposed the idea of using a hypertext-based system to access the data stored across multiple machines and databases. His employer thought the idea to be too far-fetched but later permitted him to work on the concept in 1990 to solve the problem of sharing knowledge among scientific teams in different countries.

Development began by November that same year and by May 1991, the web was born.

Two take away lessons from this story are:

i) Nigerian Youths have to start actively seeking LOCAL problems and solving them not adopting foreign solutions to our local problems

ii) The internet was formed for sharing information- but for sharing information for productive pursuits. What good will it do anyone if you share the picture of a rape scene??